Favourite Foote Photos: Mary Horodyski

I first came across Foote about twenty-five years ago in the basement of the Manitoba Archives.

I was an undergraduate history student searching for evidence of women’s role in the Winnipeg General Strike.

It seemed strange to me that women had made up one-quarter of the workforce in 1919 yet had never made it into any of the history books about the strike.

Foote’s photographs helped me prove that women attended public meetings and were on the street alongside the male strikers.

After this first Foote encounter, and over the next quarter century, Foote became intertwined with the city in my mind. Iconic, like the Golden Boy or the Arlington Bridge. So I felt surprised this summer to come across a letter from Foote – I had practically forgotten he was human, so mixed into the cement and metal of the city had he become.

I found the letter at the City of Winnipeg Archives where I had been working on the records surrounding the building of the aqueduct from Shoal Lake (how we still get our water, by the way, almost a hundred years later).

The letter is dated July 23, 1935 and in it Foote offers his photography services to the Greater Winnipeg Sanitary District. He needs the work, he says, because a “fire cleaned me out” and “my taxes are long overdue.” In fact, he says, “I am finding it very difficult to get along.” At the time of his letter, Foote would have been 62 years old—a pretty cruddy time, if you ask me, to be stuck hustling for money.

Esyllt Jones, in her Imagining Winnipeg essay, tells us that in 1948, when Foote was 75, both his legs were broken in a car accident.

So, my favourite Foote photo, now that I’ve learned a bit more about his life, and gotten a bit older myself, is the very last photo in Imagining Winnipeg: tough Mr. Foote, standing upright on the corner of Portage and Main, 77 years old, cane dangling from his overcoat pocket, and with his camera raised.

- Mary Horodyski

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Mary Horodyski is in the middle of her third degree in history – an M.A. in Archival Studies at the University of Manitoba. She also has an M.A. in History from Concordia University and a B.A. in History from the University of Manitoba. In between (and sometimes during) history degrees, she works as a writer and researcher. She recently completed her archival internship at the City of Winnipeg Archives. Her Manitoba History article on women and the Winnipeg General Strike can be found here.

Favourite Foote Photo: Laura Lamont

In this 1912 photograph by L.B. Foote, about fifty men are assembled around a long table. They’ve finished dinner and have begun on a very English dessert course of fruit, cheese, and crackers; of the many bottles on the table, some are surely port.

The guests, some sporting doughty moustaches, are wearing their best suits. Where the jury-rigged gaslights don’t shine, the vaulted room disappears into shadow except on the left, where one solitary man looks to be neither guest nor waiter.

Did he put up the scaffolding for the dangling lamps, wrap the steadying cords around the pillars? Hands on hips, he looks like he wants this evening to be over with, to take down the wooden supports, to put away his ladder and go home to bed.

Why did Foote keep him in the frame? The photographer could have asked him to step aside, or to move to the back wall, obscured by the worthies.

It’s as if Foote is telescoping his vision seven years into the future to the Winnipeg General Strike, when the workers would move into the foreground to be recorded by Foote for their own sake.

However, this is no exclusive ballroom or gentlemen’s clubroom: it’s the new, 1-million gallon underground reservoir of the St. Boniface Waterworks on Plinguet Street.

There’s an odd custom of holding banquets in subterranean structures going back to 1827 with Marc Brunel’s candelabra-lit supper in the Thames Tunnel to prove how safe it was, and continuing on to a 1994 luncheon in the Channel Tunnel attended by the Queen.

It was a way of celebrating achievements sometimes forgotten once the guests were above ground again; indeed, though impressive at the time, the St. Boniface reservoir was overtaken in importance in 1919 by the Shoal Lake aqueduct.

While the aqueduct is still working, the reservoir has been filled in. I’m not sure what the man on the left would think of having stayed out late for that.

- Laura Lamont

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Laura Lamont has published work in Descant and the Turkish Review, and can get lost for hours while wandering through digital archives.

Favourite Foote Photos: Katherena Vermette

Oh, Orlina, you have been loved, haven’t you?

I was drawn to this picture because I am so in love with old houses right now. I want one so bad! I am starting to look at them the way I once looked at good-looking men.

And she has a name to boot! How wonderful! We should all name our houses. She looks like an Orlina too. Something in the dark frames and striped awnings seems very Orlina-like!

Orlina looked so beautiful in 1915, I just had to see what she looked like today. 81 Luxton is also just a few blocks from where I grew up in the North End. I hadn’t been on that side of Main Street in nearly 20 years (yikes!), but I remembered the area fondly – the amazing “mansions” on Scotia Street, the creepy and magnificent Luxton School.

I have to confess though, as I drove around St John’s Park and cemetery, I felt myself bracing for Orlina’s possible deterioration. It is the North End after all. I love my old ‘hood, but of these once beautiful houses show the effects of age and abuse. I thought Orlina could have been mistreated, poorly kept, or worse of all fates – vinyl sided! I didn’t know what to expect. But, as I pulled up beside her, I was pleasantly surprised.

Oh Orlina, I thought, you have been loved, haven’t you?

Like a lovely elder, Orlina wears her age well. Her brick refinished, her stone banister in amazing shape, only her iron fence shows the slightest of bends.

This made me feel so happy, to know that she has been looked after. There are many like her, gorgeous old houses that have been loved and cherished. We don’t know their girlish names, but I bet somewhere in their woodwork they have one – a secret name that makes them feel pretty.

If I ever get one, I think I will call her Beth! (I hope she looks like a Beth...)

- Katherena Vermette


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Katherena Vermette is a Metis writer of poetry and fiction. Her work has appeared in several literary magazines and compilations, most recently Manitoapow: Stories from the Land of Water (Debwe Series). Vermette is a member of the Aboriginal Writers’ Collective of Manitoba, and currently completing her Master of Fine Arts (UBC). Her first collection of poetry is set for release in the fall of 2012 (The Muses’ Company).

Favourite Foote Photos: Allan Levine

Winnipeg was built by a powerful business elite, mainly born in England, Scotland and Ontario. But in its heyday, during the boom years of the early twentieth century, it was truly transformed by hard-working immigrants, who came from Eastern Europe.

Whether they were Poles, Ukrainians, Russians or Jews who journeyed half way around the world to arrive here, these immigrants gave the city, and specifically the North End where they first resided, its unique character.

The culture, food and dress, and multi-ethnic flavour we today associate with the city were derived from this collective experience.

As this early Foote photograph shows, life for the newcomers was extremely difficult and fraught with the various urban problems that defined the pre-First World War era in many North American cities like Winnipeg.

Poverty, disease and hunger in the slums were rampant and Foote brilliantly captured this sense of despair.

Here you have a group of East Europeans, fathers, brothers and their children - and the absence of women is curious - looking tired and disheveled. The men appear as if they have just arrived home from a long day at the factory or working on a road gang and the children from playing in the dirty streets.

When I have written fictional accounts of early Winnipeg, I have closely studied such photographs taken by Foote in an attempt to get inside the head of the city's East European immigrants.

I always liked this one as depicting the trials of their lives: the clothes hanging on the rope, the ray of light in an otherwise dark and dank space, and the empty stares of the men and even the two older girls. They seem to have surrendered to the harsh realities of their ordeal, though the optimistic side of me thinks that they survived and ultimately prospered.


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Allan Levine is a Winnipeg-based historian and the author of the Sam Klein Mystery trilogy set in the city's early twentieth century. His most recent book is William Lyon Mackenzie King: A Life Guided By The Hand Of Destiny.

Favourite Foote Photos: Danny Schur

My favourite Foote photograph, even more than his iconic tipped streetcar shot from Bloody Saturday, is the famous “Down With Bolshevism” shot from the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike.

The shot was taken on the west side of City Hall, earlier in June, and depicts an anti-strike veterans' parade that culminated at the Gingerbread city hall.

For me, the shot epitomizes so many of the forces at work in Winnipeg society, not just in the First World War, but from the time of Riel.

The exuberance of the Victorian architecture, the Protestant thirst for order and good government (as represented by the British Empire and parliamentary system), virulent xenophobia (if not outright racism) mixed with a preponderance of militarism, a passionate, unruly veteran class (ultimately the wild card in the outcome of the strike) – all are encompassed here with but one click of Foote's documentary camera.

And whether by accident or design, the details of the photograph are exquisite: the mayor clasping his hands to address the crowd, the Union Jack shadowed such that it appears almost 3-D, the surging symmetry of the drain pipe, pole and vertical lines of the gingerbread City Hall – and all balanced by the hat-wearing crowd.

While certainly taken in the heat of the moment, only Foote's great artistic eye could have so composed a spontaneous shot.

- Danny Schur


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Danny Schur is a Winnipeg-based composer/producer/writer/director for stage, screen and radio. Known for his musical Strike! (set against the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike), Danny is working on a new musical about Louis Riel with writing partner Rick Chafe.